A southern hemisphere mother writes about the world

Questions about Children, safety and freedom

Jody at Raising Weg has answered some really interesting questions from Amber at American Family about changing parenting norms, and how we trade off safety and freedom – it’s clearly changed, but how and why? This is something I think a lot about, so I’m going to answer them here. Chatterboy and Hungry Boy are 7 and 5.

1) At what age is a child old enough to be left alone in a car while you are out of sight for between 5-10 minutes ? ( for example to run into a store or pick up another child)

I used to leave Chatterboy in the car as a baby when I went to pay for petrol – not out of sight, and only for two or three minutes (in a locked car under the shade). I’d still do that now, but I doubt if I’d do it out of sight. I’m paranoid about the heat, and the possibility of the 5-10 minutes becoming longer, rather than anything else – although my kids are old enough now that they would probably be able to get out of a locked car, they are also obedient enough that they might not realise they should until it was too late.

2) At what age would you feel comfortable leaving a child home alone for up to 30 minutes?

I think I could leave Chatterboy (aged 7) now, but I haven’t – partly because I would not trust both of them (Hungry Boy is 5) together, and there are rarely situations where leaving one makes sense. I’ve left both of them together to go across the road to get coffee (which takes five minutes), and did that when they were 6 and 4. Half an hour is a bit longer than I feel comfortable yet, though.

3) At what age would you let your child go play alone (no adults) outside in your yard?

Our yard is only big enough for one car and an outside table – it feels like an extension of our house. So the answer to this was about two. But they tend not to play out there without us. They are more likely to be out of sight upstairs in the playroom, which has exactly the same level of risk – the most likely risk is that a fight starts and they actually damage each other.

4) What age would you let them walk 1-2 blocks to play alone in a park?

This is an interesting one for us. We live two doors away from a small childrens’ playground. One of the local kids, call him Zac, started going there by himself about six. For him it was crossing a quiet road, and then walking about 20 metres. The whole neighbourhood disapproved, but partly I think, because the parents had made themselves unpopular in a number of other ways. I’d be happy to let our boys walk to the playground by themselves, but I’m not sure about letting them play by themselves. They asked me the other day, and I was reluctant – partly, I think, because of the previous neighbourhood disapproval, but also because of the remote chance of physical injury. I think we’re close to letting them play together – now that we’re at the age, I think Zac was actually totally fine at the age of six.

Occasionally in the evenings now, we send Chatterboy out to run around the block (which is about 200m long, and 20m wide), when he has excess energy. He quite likes that. But so far, he hasn’t been allowed to cross any road by himself, so we wouldn’t let him do anything that involved crossing a road.

We’ll send both Chatterboy and Hungry Boy up the street to a neighbour’s house with a prior phone call, and us watching them cross the road. They love the grownupness of that. Their friends up the road (who are 10 and 7) will often come down by themselves, even without the phone call. To me the biggest question here is the crossing the road question. The Roads and Traffic Authority has a pamphlet they hand out which says that children don’t have enough depth perception and understanding to cross a road by themselves until 10. That seems too old to me, but I can’t help but take it into account.

5) At what age would you let your child have a sleepover with a friend from school if you had only met that child’s parent a few times in passing?

The boys have had quite a few sleepovers now, but always with friends who we have had a reasonable amount to do with. I think in all cases we’ve been to the friends place ourselves first – not in a particularly checking out way, but just because the relationship hasn’t progressed to sleepover stage without a fair bit of interaction first. So this one feels like whatever age it is that they will have their own school relationships without us getting much involved – for our kids that looks like being a few years off yet.

And what are the factors that affect our decisions?

At the age of 9, I was commuting to school by walking a mile by myself, catching a train (with my classmates) and then walking a short distance at the other end. I think I was sensible enough to do that, and I’m confident my children will be too. Mr Penguin walked a mile or so to school (in rural Scotland) from a fairly young age, and rode his bike pretty young also.

Our boys are generally pretty obedient out in the world. So if we tell them to do something, out of our sight, we can mostly trust them to do it. When leaving them behind for five minutes while getting coffee, they are much less likely to fight in that five minutes than if we are actually there (which is easy to tell by the aftermath).

BUT, since I was at school, there are far fewer children walking the streets. So motorists are less used to watching out for children, and if there are any nasty people out there, your chances of being the child attacked in some way are higher.

I’m possibly overly concerned by what the people in our neighbourhood think. Our boys run on ahead of us a lot when we’re walking around our suburb, and it is interesting to watch people look at them twice when they think that they are out by themselves.

I do think we all worry far too much about stranger danger – out of all proportion to the risk. Samantha Knight was a 9 year old girl who disappeared in Sydney in 1986 while walking home from school. The number of children walking home alone from school in Sydney dropped almost immediately. But in the end, it turned out she was abducted by an acquaintance, who had babysat her in the past. It wasn’t the walking home from school alone that did it (although it probably helped the opportunity) – it was the access to an acquaintance who turned out to be a murdering paedophile.

Advertisements

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

7 Responses

Your last point is so difficult, isn’t it? There have been not one but three reported (and corroborated, I believe) stranger sexual assaults of primary school age children after school here just in recent months, one involving a knife, the others very traumatic also (not that it’s ever not traumatic). There was a little girl raped and murdered a couple of years ago in a public toilet. And another girl indecently assaulted by a stranger in a toy aisle locally a couple of weeks ago (We only know about this one because of the CCTV being publicly released; I believe there are other events that haven’t been reported to the public). So this risk “feels” quite high to parents around here at the moment.

We are lucky to live on the corner of a cul-de-sac packed with primary school age families who look out for each other, so the groups of children do sometimes roam from one backyard to the next on holidays and weekends. I’ve just started letting my six year old run around the corner to next door to see if they’re home and ready to play, though I still feel mildly antsy about it for some reason. He doesn’t cross the road independently yet. His skills in that respect are developing, so when he does I expect I’ll let him walk home, perhaps with a group of neighbourhood children – we’re only one block from the school, though it is two road crossings. It’s a single lane fairly quiet road in a school zone; there is no way I would consider letting him cross a double lane highway or anything like that in the near future. He gets around the depth and speed perception skills by waiting until the road is completely clear, which it is often enough to cross fairly readily. So this one is very contextual, just as the neighbourhood one is.

I haven’t left him at home alone at all yet. I’m not sure when I would. Out for an evening, I expect to probably feel comfortable by the age of 12, because that’s the age I was babysitting my younger brother for an evening (including dinner prep, etc).

Sleepovers haven’t come up yet. He’s only ever had them with grandparents, starting at age two. I’d consider them now with friends we are close to, but not with school people, none of whom we know well.

[…] Penguin Unearthed has posted her response to a bunch of thought-provoking questions originally from AmericanFamily about changing parenting norms and the inevitable trade-off between child safety and freedom. Below are the questions and I’m tempted to answer ‘never’ to all of them, even though the whole ’slow parenting’ and ‘tinkering parenting’ movements theoretically really appeal to me and I believe today’s (first world) children are pretty much safer than any generation before them (like, remember when your parents let you play in flood-swollen creeks and treasure-hunt at the town dump?). But then again my child is only 3 and pretty much never wants to be out of my sight so I’m not exactly exploring the reality of this topic yet. And at this point I’m probably doing more to prepare her for managing her own safety than dreaming of her freedoms – like teaching her how to free herself from a locked car and how to make an emergency call. (Although these have been influenced by particular circumstances in our family). […]

My kids are not particularly obedient — they’re both willful creatures; I feel like I’m always having to beat the spirit out of them — especially my son; so I give them less freedom than I would theoretically allow. I mean, when my son was 5 and I’d drop him at kindergarten, I’d wait in my car until I saw him go through the school gate. Not because I feared for his safety, but because I thought there was a good chance he’d wander off through the neighborhood instead.

In our previous neighborhood, which was a dead-end and filled with families, I let my son ride his bike up and down the street while I stayed in our yard. He was not allowed to go out of my sight, but he was free to ride up driveways and through an obstacle course of cones in the street. He was four…

Our current neighborhood is not as amenable to wandering, but our yard is big and private, so I let both children play outside together while I’m in the house. They’re now 7 and 4. I keep the windows open so I can hear them. They are not sneaky so if they’re contemplating something I consider dangerous, I hear their conversation about it & can race out to intervene!

Regarding my rationale: Neighbors’ disapproval would keep me from allowing my children to do something I consider safe but they don’t.

My children are a little older than yours (ten and seven), so my answers differ at little. What has struck me is how much they are driven by geography – things like how many roads there are to cross and how busy they are.

There was an horrific stranger murder in New Zealand over twenty years ago now which changed ‘walking to school’ practices overnight. Very different from my own much less supervised childhood.

Hmm. I may yet steal this (very challenging and honest) post as a post for my own blog. Our Eldest is still only five and London traffic being what it is, we can’t imagine him out of our sight. But too many of those decisions are starting to loom just over the horizon.

[…] were answered many times by commenters, but transferred to other blogs as well; Raising WEG (USA), Penguin Unearthed (AU), In A Strange Land (AU) and Blue Milk (AU). I tracked this discussion back from Blue […]